This is an unpartitioned, non-clustered index being built on a partitioned table. Normally, when you build an aligned partitioned index, the index creation process requires less memory and has less noticeable impact on the system, because each partition is handled individually, one at a time. But as this is an unpartitioned (unaligned) index, each partition was built concurrently, requiring more memory and causing a greater impact on performance. Because of this, I needed to restrict the process to MaxDop 1; otherwise, the server would suffer because of too much memory pressure.

I chose Sort_In_TempDB = On because:

I’m building this index online on a very busy table and cannot afford to impact normal oeprations. By using Sort_In_TempDB = On, index transactions are separated from user transactions, allowing the user transaction log to be truncated. *

TempDB is on a different volume and therefore should reduce the duration of the operation.

The recovery for the user database is full, and the recovery for the TempDB is simple. Sorting in TempDB would minimize logging.

* Note: the transaction log for the user database still grew at a much faster rate than normal and had to be closely monitored during this operation to ensure enough free space remained.

The size of the indexed columns is 25 bytes. So I ran my calculations and came up with 36gb space requirement. We increased TempDB to 50gb and gave it a go. An hour later… ERROR. The process terminated because there would not be enough space free in TempDB to complete the operation. Obviously, my calculations were incorrect. After speaking with Chris Leonard, a man who is way too smart for his own good, I realized I had not included my clustered index in the size calculations. Doh.

Re-running my estimates, here’s what I came up with:

Index Size

25

bytes

Clustered Index Size

16

bytes

Records per Page

197

Est. Rows

1,575,000,000

Est. Number of Pages

7,995,000

Space Requirements

59

GB

Obviously, 50gb of free space just wasn’t going to cut it. I decided to give TempDB a little wiggle room and bumped up the space in TempDB to 70gb (not as easy as you’d imagine, I had to requisition more space on the SAN), then re-ran the operation. Success! The process completed in 3 hours and 24 minutes. There was a mild increase in CPU, but no applications or users experienced any issues.

For those interested in the particulars: this was used for a single-record look-up and could not be filtered by the partitioning key. The non-partitioned version of this index has 80% less reads and 11% less CPU than its partitioned counterpart.

If you’re interested in learning more about indexes, here’s some recommended reading: